Don’t need - Explanations For Forgetting: Interference

Question 1

What is interference?

Answer 1

An explanation for forgetting in terms of one memory disrupting the ability to recall another.

Question 2

When is interference most likely to occur?

Answer 2

When the two memories have some similarity.

Question 3

What is proactive interference?

Answer 3

Past learning interferes with current attempts to learn something

Question 4

What is retroactive interference?

Answer 4

Current attempts to learn something interfere with past learning.

Question 5

Who first identified retroactive interference?

Answer 5

Georg Muller and his student (Muller and Pilzecker, 1900) first identified RI effects.

Question 6

What did Muller and Pilzecker do?

Answer 6

They gave participants a list of nonsense syllables to learn for 6 minutes and then, after a retention interval, asked participants to recall the lists.

Question 7

What did Muller and Pilzecker find?

Answer 7

Performance was less good if participants has been given an intervening task between initial learning and recall (they were shown three landscapes paintings and asked to describe them).

The intervening task produced RI because the later task (describing pictures) interfered with what had previously been learned.

Question 8

Who investigated proactive interference?

Answer 8

Benton Underwood - 1957

Question 9

What did Underwood show?

Answer 9

That PI could be equally significant

Question 10

What did Underwood do?

Answer 10

Analysed the findings from a number of studies and concluded that when participants have to learn a series of word lists they do not learn the lists of words encountered later on in the sequence as well as lists of words encountered earlier on.

Question 11

What did Underwood find?

Answer 11

If participants memorised 10 or more lists, then, after 24 hours, they remembered about 20% of what they learned.

If they only leaned one list recall was over 70%.

Question 12

What did McGeoch and McDonald do?

Answer 12

1931 - experimented with the effects of similarity of materials.

They gave participants a list of 10 adjectives (list A).
Once these were learned there was then a resting interval of 10 minutes during which they learned list B, followed by recall.

Question 13

What were the results of McGeoch and McDonald study?

Answer 13

If list B was a list of synonyms of list A, recall was poor (12%);
If list B was nonsense syllabus this had less effect (26% recall);
If list B was numbers this had the least effect (37% recall).

This shows that interference is strongest the more similar the items are.
Only interference, rather than decay, can explain such effects

Question 14

What did baddeley and hitch do?

Answer 14

1977 - investigated effects in an everyday setting of rugby players recalling the names of the teams they had played against over a rugby season.

Some players played in all of the games in the season whereas others missed some games because of injury.
The time interval from start to end of the season was the same for all players but the number of intervening games was different for each player because of missed games.

Question 15

What did Baddeley and Hitch find?

Answer 15

If interference theory is correct then those players who played most games should forget proportionately more because of interference.

Baddeley and Hitch found this, demonstrating the effects of interference in everyday life.

Question 16

What are the evaluative points?

Answer 16

Research is quite artificial 
Interference only explains some situations of forgetting
Accessibly versus availability 
Real-world application to advertising 
Individual differences

Question 17

What is meant by research is quite artificial?

Answer 17

There is considerable evidence that supports both pro and retroactive interference.

However, one issue is that most of this research has been lab-based and often I used rather than artificial lists of words and/or nonsense syllables.

Thus the findings may not relate to everyday uses of memory, which tends not to involve words lists.

In addition, participants may lack motivation to remember the links in such studies and this may allow interference effects to appear stronger than they really are.
In other words the research is low in ecological validity.

The counterargument is that interference effects have been observed in everyday situations.

Question 18

What is meant by interference only explains some situations of forgetting?

Answer 18

The issue appears to be that, while interference effects do occur in everyday life, they don’t occur that often.

Rather special conditions are required for interference to lead to forgetting - the two memories need to be quite similar.

It is for this reason that interference is considered to be a relatively unimportant explanation for everyday forgetting.

Anderson (2000) concluded that there is no doubt that interference plays a role in forgetting, but how much forgetting can be attributed to interference remains unclear.

Question 19

What is meant by accessibility versus availability?

Answer 19

Researchers have often questioned whether interference effects actually cause a memory to disappear or whether interference effects are just temporary.

Ceraso (1967) found that, if memory was tested again after 24 hours, recognition (accessibly) showed considerable spontaneous recovery, whereas recall (availability) remained the same.
This suggests that interference occurs because memories were temporarily not accessible rather than having actually been lost (unavailable).

The study by Tulving and Psotka, which is described on the next spread, also supports this finding that interference affects availability rather than accessibility.

Question 20

What is meant by real world application to advertising?

Answer 20

There is a considerable body of research on the effects of interference when people are exposed to adverts from competing brands within a short time period.

For example, Danaher (2008) found that both recall and recognition of an advertisers message were impaired when participants were exposed to two advertisements for competing brands within a week.

This is a serious problem considering the amount of money that advertisers spend only to have the effect of their advertisement diluted by interference.

Danaher suggests that one strategy might be enhance the memory trace by running multiple exposures to an advertisement on one day rather than spread these out over a week.
This results in reduced interference from competitors’ advertisement.

Question 21

What is meant by individual differences?

Answer 21

There is evidence that some people are less affected by proactive interference than others.

Kane and Engle (2000) demonstrated that individuals with a greater working memory (WM) span were less susceptible to proactive interference.

The researchers tested this by giving participants three word lists to learn.

Those participants with low working memory spans showed greater proactive interference when recalling the second and third lists than did participants with higher spans.

A further test suggested that having a greater working memory span meant having greater resources to consciously control processing and counteract the effects of proactive interference.